Mes: noviembre 2008

Something is changing…

Over the last two years some interesting things have happened in the .net community, among these things I would like to highlight the followings:

  • Greater interest in Domain Driven Design in contrast to the traditional MSDN Data driven way. This has stimulated the adoption of certain design techniques like DI and AOP among other.
  • As a consequence of the previous point there has been a wider adoption and diffusion of open source tools (beyond the P&P application blocks). Tools like NHibernate, Castle and Spring.Net have proven to be high quality products providing efficient solutions for typical problems in enterprise development. Event Microsoft (in a certain way) has recognized these facts, I think ASP.NET MVC is an example of this.
  • Massive adoption of agile development practices like continous integration, unit testing, pair programming and iterative development among others.

I think that evidence of these facts are the creation of the ALT.NET community and the publication of the excellent book «Foundations of Programming» by Karl Seguin.
I see this as great progress for the maturity of the community and the quality of its developments.

Playing with PHP on .NET

During the last couple of weeks some colleague have been working with PHP. Yesterday while I was reading some blogs I remember that there was a PHP implementation over the .NET framework called Phalanger. I have some free time so I decided to test it. I started by googling for the project website to download the bits and installed them following the instructions. Everything went all right, but we I try to run some php pages I get an error related to the «include» function, so I went to the discussion forum at project site and I found this post that indicate to install another version. That was all,  now I have run some of my scripts without problems. In next few days I will doing some more tests.

SmallTalks 2008

Last Thursday, Friday and Saturday, it took place the Second Argentine Conference of Smalltalk: SmallTalks 2008. One of most interesting tracks I attended was the one given by Mariano Martinez Peck, Esteban Lorenzano and German Palacios about their project: SqueakDBX. It is a driver to allow Squeak applications to connect to relational databases, you can get more information in the official website.

Congratulations to the organization team, it was great event!.

Web Services and DataSets, a bad mix (ws-part 3)

If you are not familiar with the .Net Platform, DataSets are objects analogous to a database in memory. A DataSet contains not only a collection of DataTables, but also information about the primary keys and relations between the tables it contains. I ‘ve seen some people using DataSets to move data between the different layers of the application. I don’t like it, but that is part of other post, the big issue is when somebody starts using  DataSets to build Web Services to interoperate with other technologies/organizations. This is a sad design decision because the way DataSets are serialized is not always understandable for non .Net consumers. The reason for this is explained very clearly in detail in this post by Paul Ballard.

New open source project

Yesterday I started a new open source project. It is a framework for developing video games with Java, using the MVC design pattern. My intention with this project is to help Algo3 students to develop their applications concentrating in the Model while the framework takes care of most of the complexities of the View and Controller. The name of the project is Titiritero and it is hosted in Google Code at this location: http://code.google.com/p/titiritero/